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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
difficult and principled route - although it separated him from the very
movement he had helped
to
build. If not for Vietnam, it is perhaps
doubtful that Lowenstein would have been able
to
reconnect with the
young and to touch the current of protest that emerged from the na–
tion's campuses. Not only did Lowenstein oppose the war, but as Chafe
puts it, as a candidate for Congress, he made "political opposition to the
war - and the president - the
raisorl
d'erre
of his life." Lowenstein saw
the Vietnam war as a betrayal of the best of America's traditions and our
involvement there as a foreign policy that was bound to fail, since esca–
lation of military involvement produced only more discord and alien–
ation at home. But unlike the radicals, who denounced the war in abso–
lutist terms, and who sanctioned extra-parliamentary actions and eventu–
ally illegal and violent forms of protest, Lowenstein insisted on working
through the system and giving it a chance. As much as he detested LBJ's
escalation and chicanery, he could write, in a letter to the New Left,
that "the police are not Fascist pigs. America is not a racist, imperialist
society. Lyndon Johnson is not John Kennedy. Hate is not love. And no,
I am not an agent of the CIA."
Lowenstein sought to get the Democratic Party
to
replace
LBJ
with
a committed antiwar candidate. His own work to find a candidate led
to the Eugene McCarthy candidacy, and eventually, his behind-the-scenes
involvement with and support of Robert F. Kennedy led to his decision
to
also enter the race as an antiwar candidate. But throughout this pe–
riod, Lowenstein, unlike even some other moderates, never supported
unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, or even Kennedy's favored solution,
a "coalition government" in South Vietnam with the Vietcong.
Strangely, Chafe neglects to point out that in various speeches,
Lowenstein consistently opted for the solution of a monitored free elec–
tion in South Vietnam, in which all political forces, including the
Vietcong, could freely run candidates. But he was certain that given such
a choice, the Vietnamese in the South would vote for a non-Communist
and pro-Western regime. Calling for a Vietcong victory, or unilateral
withdrawal, and engaging in acts of violence, from shouting down
speakers
to
planting bombs, Lowenstein argued, only reinforced the ne–
anderthal right wing and harmed opposition
to
the war.
Yet while Lowenstein worked against the extremes, his own efforts
pushed the Democratic Party unalterably
to
the left and to the adoption
of positions in the future that, had he lived, he clearly would have been
opposed to. Moreover, as time passed, his own commitment moved
towards the far liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and he had little
to say about the problems inherent in Great Society liberalism, the
proliferation of the welfare state, the growth of the underclass, and the
